Artist Reception: Ian Desai, Living Colors

What I’ve Learned So Far (2026)

Ian Desai is a professor, author, and abstract artist. His art spans multiple media including painting, weaving, digital art, and printing. Ian’s show at the Norfolk Library, Living Colors, runs from May 2 – June 3. The show brings together two recent strands of Ian’s art that celebrate color and rely on digital tools in different ways. One is a group of digitally-created color studies that aim to uplift in challenging times. The other is a series of bright mixed-media prints. All of the artwork in Living Colors grapples with the urge to make meaning and beauty in the midst of grief and contradiction and embraces the creative practices that sustain us through all seasons of life.

Please join us at a reception for the artist on Sunday, May 3, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., graciously hosted by the Library Associates.

More about the show from the artist:

My art celebrates color: colors coming together in combination to create new colors without losing the spirit of what they have been. A mixed person myself, I am always mixing to create.

My formative experiences as an artist were in a letterpress printing studio in the basement of the Bodelian Library in Oxford. More than fifteen years later, after returning to art in the pandemic, I still draw on printmaking techniques and tools. Working with acrylics, inks, and oils, I often use wood blocks to make paint impressions that I then smear, smudge, scrape and reconfigure into abstract art that blurs the boundary between printing and painting. Sometimes the blocks themselves become artworks (like Brush with Life in this show).

Alongside my enthusiasm for getting my hands covered in ink and paint, I am also a digital artist—albeit one who is wary of digital technology. During the pandemic, when friends and family were far away and the world felt reduced to the size of the screen in front of me, I began making digital color studies on my phone to try to keep buoyant and upbeat. When my best friend passed away suddenly and I was 3000 miles away, I clung to this practice like a life raft.

I have chosen to show some of these digitally-born color studies alongside prints of my mixed media works to explore the differences and similarities between digital and physical art.

This exhibition is dedicated, in loving memory, to Shirley Smith and Kate McSpadden.

Mixtape: American Music 2 (2025-26)

Color Study: After Kate (2022)